Obama’s Con Game: Budget Priorities Part 1

This one doesn’t come directly from President Obama (though many others have). It comes from White House Senior Advisor, David Plouffe as reported this morning in Politico Playbook. However, it’s consistent with the pattern of intellectual dishonesty exhibited by the President and his administration. It’s what I call “Low Information Explanation” – L.I.E for short.

It doesn’t take much critical thinking to see through this one. Here is the entire quote from Politico this morning.

DAVID PLOUFFE, White House senior adviser, will be out with a blast email this a.m.: “[W]hen Congressman Paul Ryan put out a new budget for the House Republicans this week, we spent some time with it. We took a careful look and did the math. Here’s what we learned. Republicans in Washington want to give millionaires and billionaires an average tax break of at least $150,000. … To show you what we mean, we’ve put together an infographic that breaks out the kinds of priorities we’d have to give up for the $150,000 tax break that Republicans want to give to the nation’s millionaires and billionaires. Check it out below and forward this message to your friends. The more people who share it, the more folks will understand what’s at stake and how we can do better for the middle class.” See the graphic. http://bit.ly/GGUuFy

Now I’m no big fan of Paul Ryan or the Republican budget or the Republicans for that matter. But the argument above is a con job pure and simple. Did you catch it?

To show you what we mean, we’ve put together an infographic that breaks out the kinds of priorities we’d have to give up for the $150,000 tax break that Republicans want to give to the nation’s millionaires and billionaires.

The first few items on the chart are senior medicare prescription costs, a high school computer lab, a year of medical care for a veteran and medical research grants. So Plouffe implies that the trade off is the incremental dollar of taxes denied to the government against an incremental dollar of senior citizen’s medicine. That’s exactly what his statement and chart say. Are those really the Obama administration’s priorities for budget cuts?

Apparently Plouffe is a very poor decision maker because a good decision maker would trade his incremental dollar of cost ( tax cuts) against the LEAST valuable benefit to be given up. If you are $50 short on your monthly budget do you sacrifice grandma’s medicine or the movie tickets? Plouffe trades extremely high value benefits. Plouffe sacrifices grandma! Is that really the way these guys make decisions?

Really? Grandma? There is nothing else we can cut first?

Should we cut senior medical benefits or should cut the wars first?

Should we cut school computer labs or should we eliminate the IRS and TSA first?

Should we cut veteran’s benefits or should we eliminate corporate welfare first?

Should we cut medical research or should we eliminate the war on drugs first and the associated prison and police costs?

No wonder the country is in such bad shape with people like that making decisions. Either Plouffe and the Obama administration are intellectually weak or perhaps they just think you are.